This is a topic I don’t normally discuss: I will not engage in a conversation about whether the armed forces of Ukraine, or the Ukrainian population in general, or the people who stood on Maidan, are Nazis or fascists. On Twitter for many years I have had a rule that the instant a counterparty in any discussion uses either slur, the conversation ends, that person is blocked, and I say goodbye using quite another “F” word. Conversations on this topic do not deserve the dignity of civilized debate.
However, breaking my own rule, let’s look further into this issue.
The history of this line of dishonesty against Ukraine goes back (at least) to the EuroMaidan Revolution of Nov. 2, 2013 to Feb. 22, 2014. According to Kremlin propaganda, during those 93 days, the people of the Maidan (that means me and a couple of million others) were apparently ultra-nationalist extremists, or in the sway of such people.
This is simply not true, of course, but when we take the claims put forward by Russia on one hand, and reality on the other, and then add into that equation the intellectual laziness of “two sides to every story and the truth is probably in the middle,” the inventors of these myths have managed to lead some people to believe that, on balance, a good number of those on the Maidan must have been hard-line extremists.
In truth, the percentage of people on Maidan who were ultra-nationalists, as any honest person who witnessed it will tell you, was so small as to be insignificant. To be frank, in terms of statistical probability, the percentage of gay people on the Maidan was higher than the number of right-wingers, but we don’t call the Maidan a “gay” coup.
But having committed to this false narrative, Russian President Vladimir Putin had to stick to it – even after former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and the members of his regime fled Ukraine. The Kremlin could not tell the truth, which was: “We are harboring here in Moscow members of a corrupt regime who were overthrown by the ordinary citizens of Ukraine. They were overthrown because Ukrainians were sick and tired of seeing their country plundered by a kleptocratic elite, just like the one here in Russia.”
So Putin had to stick with his lies.
So, in his next panicky move (there is nothing that he fears more than a successful popular revolution) Putin moved to “protect” the people of Crimea (though no threat to them existed) and now, even more boldly, played the “Nazi” card, claiming falsely that Ukrainian nationalists were on their way to Crimea to attack the people there.
Far-right reality
There are actually some right-wing sympathizers in Ukraine. They are few in number. They make some noise from time to time. They’re not hard to find, but they’re essentially irrelevant to the vast majority of the population, and they are certainly not supported by any significant numbers of people.
The National Corpus is one example. They blockaded a branch of Russia’s Sberbank close to the Golden Gates monument in the center of Kyiv. They committed acts of vandalism, bricking doors up and spraying expanding foam into the shutters on the bank’s windows, and also spray painting graffiti. It made for good TV in Moscow, but passersby will have noticed no more than they had reasonable taste in music and that they posed zero threat to anyone.
At any one time after the initial day of this protest, there were a maximum of a dozen teenagers in masks who thought they were being pretty cool. This was hardly the personification of fervent Nazism.
The same group has combined with an offshoot of the Azov Battalion to start some new kind of ominous-looking street patrol gang. I walk the streets of Kyiv every single day, I’ve never seen them patrolling anywhere. Nice promo video though. I wonder who paid for that, and who footed the bill for the swish uniforms?
The Azov Battalion warrants more of a mention. Do some people who joined this group have views others would find to be unacceptable in modern society and disgraceful in general? Yes. This is an undeniable fact. It is also an undeniable fact that Azov is one battalion of many. It is also a fact that the number of those with antisocial opinions in Azov is a subset of the overall group. And it is also a fact that the Azov Battalion as a whole has been confined to barracks and not taken part in any fighting for two-and-a-half years.
The problem with the narrative that comes from Moscow is that it is an attempt to denigrate the entire military of Ukraine by painting them all with a “Nazi” or “fascist” brush.
In fact, the men and women of Ukraine’s armed forces are heroes: There are approximately 250,000 of them, they have stood up and defended their country from foreign invasion, and they deserve both respect and gratitude. They do not deserve to be tarnished with slurs from Russia – slurs that are parroted, shamefully, by useful idiots in free countries.
Sure, it’s possible to track down some fringe group in a forest somewhere in Ukraine, but it is not impossible to find such people in every country. In the United Kingdom intolerant individuals unite under the banners of “Britain First” and the “English Defence League” while the United States has a president who uses the term “very fine people” to describe white supremacists.
Fact check: far-right political groups have little political support in Ukraine – much less than in the rest of Europe, and of course much, much less than in Russia.
Turn the microscope around!
While Russia is busy accusing Ukraine of being a hotbed of far-right activity, this is nothing more than a distraction from the Kremlin’s own links to fascists.
In recent days we saw the fourth anniversary of Russia’s fake referendum in Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula. Who did Russia get to serve as “international monitors” in an attempt to paint this event as legitimate and legal? The list of these individuals is a who’s who of far-right figures from across Europe.
If we look at the various extremist groups from across Europe, how many of them have ties to Russia , and how many of them openly express admiration for Putin?
France’s far-right Front National, unable to borrow money under the leadership of Marine Le Pen due to reputational risk, received 9.4 million euros as a “loan” from the Moscow-owned First Czech-Russian Bank, only for that loan to be forgotten about as the bank was wound down.
Nigel Farage, the former leader of Britain’s right-wing nationalist and immigrant-intolerant populist UK Independence Party, has repeatedly rushed to the defense of Putin and urged the west “not to poke the Russian bear.”
These warnings of “not poking” Russia have come in response to things like Russia’s unprovoked military aggression against Ukraine. Farage is on record recently saying that the EU is more dangerous than Russia. This absurd statement was made not long before the Novichok nerve agent poisoning of Sergeyand Yulia Skripal and UK police Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (along with a couple of dozen others) on the streets of Britain.
Hungary’s far-right Jobbik Party has been described as “being among Europe’s staunchest allies for the Kremlin.”
Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO) signed a cooperation deal with Russia’s (then Putin’s) United Russia Party back in 2016, and at the time Reuters wrote that “the FPO has long taken a pro-Russia stance, calling for an end to European Union Sanctions against Moscow imposed over the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine.”
Interestingly (although this is probably just a coincidence), the FPO’s leadership made the announcement of their Russia Unity Party tie-up after visiting the United States, where they met members of the Trump transition team, including Trump’s fired former national security adviser, Michael Flynn.
There are many more examples.
The use of the “N” word and the “F” word against Ukrainians is a deliberate ploy to enable Russia’s war against Ukraine. The Kremlin’s propaganda narrative is false. Ukraine is not overrun with people with unpleasant views. The country is not run by people with far-right inclinations. The people of the Maidan were not extremists. The armed forces of Ukraine as a whole are not tainted by having a few people with disgusting views in their ranks.
In fact, it is Putin and the Kremlin who support far-right movements, and it is far-right movements that support Putin. The reality of Putin’s associations with the far right are plain. If anyone deserves to be tarred with the “N” and “F” words, it’s him.
